Monday, December 30, 2013

Sketchbook Word Drawings - Nov & Dec / 2013

I have continued to work in that sketchbook with crappy paper, which happens to be pretty good for short pen strokes. Which is ideal for word drawings. I sometimes wonder if I will ever run out of words for these. So far, so good. The combinations seem endless.
Fair Ball - Nov 19, 2013
Mission of Mercy - Nov 27, 2013
Respite - Nov 20, 2013
Razor Burn - Dec 1, 2013
Reflex - Relax - Dec 3, 2013
Vintage - Dec 18, 2013
Net Gain - Dec 6, 2013
Smog of War - Dec 30, 2013

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

December Funnies

Here are a selection of sketchbook cartoons from last month's drawing sessions.

Monday, December 2, 2013

Three New Abstracts

Here are three new abstracts that I've completed over the last several weeks. For Chatter and Kalamazoo, I started the canvases covered with words and symbols respectively. My thought was to energize the surface before adding gestural brushstrokes. Since it is left to chance as to what words and symbols are still visible, I think it adds another level of serendipity.

Chatter - Acrylic on Canvas - 30"H × 42"W



Kalamazoo - Acrylic on Canvas - 31"H × 54"W
Bix - Acrylic on Canvas - 30"H × 31"W

Saturday, November 16, 2013

Word Sketchbook Drawings

I have an adage: Never fall in love with an art product. As soon as you fall in love, said product will be discontinued and unavailable and you are left with a broken heart and the task of finding a replacement. This has happened to me time after time with sketchbooks. I had just finished a case of books made by Creative Mark called Relexions.(8.5"W ×11"H, white linen cover) and when I went to reorder, I found that that particular book had been discontinued. I did some homework on the web and did find another book that I was hopeful about. Another book by Creative Mark, again called Reflexions, but this one had a black cover. So I bought three. Much to my chagrin the paper was inferior and my crow quill pen ripped the paper. It was a terrible book for my purposes. So I took to Facebook to bitch about my sketchbook woes and received the following level headed reprimand/advice from my buddy Rob Dunlavey, "Hey, buck up Hal! Listen to your media (inferior or excellent) and make the images that result from the dialog." He was right, of course and I discovered that these sketchbooks were pretty good for word drawings.

For the last several years I have been making layered word paintings. The words in these paintings are free associated and touch on popular culture, geography, literature, art, history and what ever else pops into my head. I'm sure a psychotherapist could have a field day with these paintings. I have also done alot of sketchbook work along these lines. So I will devote these inferior books to word drawings. To finish the story, I was able to find a reasonably priced sketchbook with suitable paper from a company called Stillman & Birn. And all is right in the universe once again.

Here are some pages from my this new word sketchbook, drawn in my morning sketchbook sessions from Nov 5 - Nov 12, 2013.



Tuesday, November 5, 2013

November Funnies

Here's a selection of sketchbook cartoons culled from the last month of drawings. I send out an email blast of sketchbook cartoons every month. If you'd like to receive them, let me know and I'll put you on my list.




Friday, October 18, 2013

Sketchbook to Watercolor

Lift - pen, ink and watercolor - 9.75"H × 12.75"W
Here are some fairly recent watercolors. When I have time to do a watercolor, I'll look through my sketchbooks for ideas that appeal to me. I like to keep them simple, as I translate the sketchbook ideas directly to the watercolor paper without preliminary drawings. I thought it would be fun to include some sketchbook drawings upon which these watercolors were based.
Triad - pen, ink and watercolor - 8.75"H × 12.75"W
Recurring Thought Patterns - pen, ink and watercolor -8.5"H × 12.5"W
The Name Escapes Me - mixed media - 8.75"H × 12.75"W
This last one came about a little differently. I started this at the end of the day and was disappointed with the penwork under the letters. So I bagged it and went back to the house for dinner a bit bummed.That evening I tuned in Gerhard Richter Paints, a wonderful film about German artist Gerhard Richter's process. (Available on Netflix) After watching that for a bit I felt reinvigorating and headed back to the studio and applied heavy black to the problematic linework and proceeded. Seems I needed Gerhard's permission to work with my mistakes.

See more of my watercolors at: www.halmayforth.com

Sunday, October 13, 2013

A Productive Week

Last week was a productive week for me. The weather was nice, sunny with a crispness in the air. Mornings were cool in the studio. A blanket over the snoozing poodle. I had some good sketchbook sessions as well, and I'll be posting some of those drawings later. Afternoons I continued to work on my big wall and finished two abstracts. Here they are. Click on captions below for more information.


Meadow - Acrylic on Canvas - 29"H × 53"W

Jubilee - Acrylic on Canvas - 31"H × 55"W


Thursday, October 10, 2013

The Portinari Altarpiece by Hugo Van Der Goes


One of my favorite Flemish paintings from the later half of the fifteenth century is the Portinari Altarpiece by Hugo Van Der Goes. This huge triptych (central panel - 8' 3.5" W × 10'W, wings - 8' 3.5"H × 4' 7.5' W) was commissioned by Tommaso Portinari, in 1474 . Portinari was a Florentine living in Bruges at the time and was the manager of the local D'Medici bank. Upon his death in 1483, the painting was transported to Florence and installed in the Church of Saint'Egidio where it created a stir within the Florentine artistic community. There had been Florentine artists that had traveled to Flanders to study Flemish art and the works of  Van Der Weyden and Van Eyck were known among Florentine artists, but this was probably the first time that a Flemish tour de force had been available for viewing and study by local painters.

 The scale of the figures was considered old school by local painters as Italian art at the time was interested in the consistently scaled integration of human figures into a rationally receding architectural setting using linear perspective. The scale of Van Der Goes figures on the other hand, was based on hierarchy of importance. The main figures of Mary and Joseph and the Shepherds are large, the patron Saints in the wings smaller and the patron family and the angels, the smallest. Scale aside, the Florentine artists were struck by the realism in Van Der Goes work, in particular in the drapery,flowers, animals and above all the human character and emotion made a deep impression.



But what I think is pivotal was the time frame in which it arrived and the fact that this was an oil painting. This painted appeared in Florence on the cusp of the explosion of the Italian High Renaissance. Up until this point, Italian artists painted primarily in fresco and tempera. Could the Portinari Altarpiece have turned on Italian artists to to possibilities of oil paint? The explosion in the usage of oil paint in Italian art seems to coincide with the arrival of this painting.


The subject of the painting is the adoration of the newborn Jesus by Mary and Joseph, a host of angels and a few shepherds, who have rushed in from the fields. It is based on the visionary writings of Medieval Swedish mystic St. Bridget, who described Mary kneeling to adore the Child immediately after giving birth. Oddly, here is the baby Jesus laying alone on the ground, which seems to me a very northern construct. Italian images of Mary and Jesus are all touchy-feely, and show  genuine warmth with a lot of TLC. But here the newborn is looking quite solitary, flailing away in the dirt. Upon closer inspection, he is actually lying on rays of light, but that doesn't seem to be much in the way of a comfort upgrade. The painting is choker-block full of symbolism which I won't go into here, but another aspect of the painting that I'll note is that Van Der Goes has chosen a Flemish landscape for the setting complete with bare trees and December skies rather that Bethlehem. This follows the Flemish trend of portraying biblical events in contemporary settings.

The background is populated with narratives that support the main theme. On the left is Mary and Joseph traveling to Bethlehem, in the center are the Three Magi, who have yet to make the scene and on the right, the shepherds are visited by an angel.

One more thing. In his outstanding book, Secret Knowledge, British artist David Hockney presents compelling evidence the the Portinari Altarpiece was painted with the assistance of a camera obscura. He sites that "the composition was not constructed according to the laws of single point linear perspective, but instead has many different viewpoints, many different windows onto the world - it has a multiwindow approach. We see each figure straight on, regardless of where they are in the scene." Fascinating stuff.

Van Der Goes' life is fairly well chronicled, as he was the Dean of the Painter's Guild of Ghent from 1468 - 1475. He seems to have had problems with melancholia and depression. At the height of his success and fame, he entered a monastery outside of Brussels as a lay brother. This did not interrupt his career, however and he continued painting, completing the Portinari Altarpiece behind monastery walls. In 1481, five years after it's completion, Van Der Goes suffered a mental breakdown and died a year later.